Monday, October 18, 2010

The NES is Silver today

25 years ago today at FAO Schwarz in Manhattan NY, the first Nintendo Entertainment Systems went on sale in the United States. Home video-gaming had died completely in the U.S. three years earlier in The Crash of 1983, and Nintendo had to package the device with a toy robot in order to convince retailers to carry it.

10 comments:

I still have mine, too. It doesn't work, but it's still there. The day the Nintendo was born in America was the day I became a full-fledged video game fan. It's still the inspiration for me to break into the business as a developer. Kudos to the big N for setting the standard. And to all those wonderful haters out there, who hate on Nintendo nowadays for one reason or another: to deny Nintendo its respect is to deny your roots. REMEMBER YOUR ROOTS! LOL. J/K. In all seriousness, I'm glad the NES (pronounced N-E-S, not NESS, as most noobs try to do these days)existed.

Let's see here, we have the Metroid Prime Series, Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, the Smash Bros series... Neue, it isn't just that you're refusing to recognize tons of worthy achievements, but you seem to be doing so in the nostalgic blanket of assuming that the good old days must have been better even if they were days of repetitive platformers that usually had awful controls.

And no, I'm not hating on nintendo. NES and SNES both have their place in gaming history, but it is not as though gaming has never made any steps forward since then; the advance of technology has been much more important to video games than it is to movies.

And for the record, having been alive when the NES came out does not make you a better gamer or a wiser gamer, just an older gamer.

Wow Rarer, you sure do assert allot about be that isn't true, and it's pretty arrogant and insulting to insinuate that the only way I could have a negative opinion about Nintendo is to flat out ignore all of the "achievements" you personally champion.

Bullshit.

Metroid WAS super repetitive. Even more so than games like Castlevania that really pushed the bar.

I could give you Zelda, but it certainly wasn't the only game doing stuff like that, and while it may be the most popular it is certainly not the most innovative.

Smashbrothers is an awful example. Not the first game to use that style of game play, and Powerstone later brought it to a 3D plane. Where is the newest Smash Bros at? 2D... In 2010. Market Pandering is not respectable.

I don't really care about the games, either. It's the consoles that move the industry ahead, and Nintendo has been dropping that particular ball since the N64.

Wow I got my first NES when I was 2 years old and the console was already in its 4th year. My God, I remember the countless hours that my dad and I would play on a small tv in his room with duck hunt and super mario bros. Or when I was excited to see him play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

My funniest experience: my parents rented me the first Ghostbusters game. When I started to play it, I said it was broken because I kept driving around the city and found no ghosts. Funnier still was when my dad started to play it and he couldn't figure out how the hell to face the ghosts either. I even remember seeing my dad argue with the game renter saying the game was broken. Only 3 years ago, I discovered while playing an emulator, that the game was in fact overtly complicated for no reason nor was it fun. The delicious irony from our childhoods.

Haha, thanks for the memories Nintendo. I might not like the Wii as much as I used to, but damn have you done incredible things for video games

Our NES dies soon after we bought our SNES. We still wanted to play it tons so we ended up buying the short-lived "top-loader" official NES console that came with the nice "bone" controllers (retail $50). That things is sweet. Still works great to this day, and they fetch a decent price if you ever decide to part with it. (I won't)

Hence, why at times, software outsells hardware, and vice versa. If you don't have the game to play, then your console is a brick. If you don't have a console, you have a coaster. I also notice how easy it is to hate a company when they don't do what you want. As for moving the industry ahead, gee, I wonder why the Move and the Kinect exist?

@Neue: The only thing I insinuated is what you said: That you didn't believe that Nintendo had accomplished anything since SNES and that to do so you'd have to refuse to recognize what they've done since then as achievements.

I listed those titles since I was confident that you couldn't not claim that none of them were accomplishments (as in fact you did admit that OoT was good)

And I don't see how you can admit that they've made good games but say that their hardware is inferior, hardware is to be judged by the games that are on it.

As for Smash Bros, that's a ridiculous complaint. If it works well in 2d why does it matter that 3d exists? Are we supposed to believe that every game after Wolfenstein that wasn't in 3d was obsolete? Is Braid a bad game?

If you want to claim that, then go ahead, if you want to make a contrary claim entirely, go ahead, but don't get defensive and complain that you're being personally attacked because someone disagrees with you.

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About Me

Bob is a part-time independent filmmaker, part-time amateur film critic and full time Movie Geek. He is heterosexual, a pisces, and a severely lapsed Catholic. He is a tireless enemy of censorship, considers his personal politics "Libertine" and enjoys acting as a full time irritant to overly serious people of ALL political stripes.